Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 37-second snippet of House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking after yesterday’s jobs bill meeting left me fuming.
Asked to comment on the upcoming bipartisan health care summit that President Obama proposed, here’s what Boehner said:
It’s going to be very difficult to have a bipartisan conversation with regard to a 2,700-page health care bill that a Democrat majority in the House and a Democrat majority in the Senate can’t pass. So why are we going to talk about a bill that can’t pass?
First of all, health care legislation did pass. In both chambers. The House passed its bill. The Senate passed its bill. They were in the process of reconciling their bills when the Senate lost its 60th seat to Scott Brown. Now, because the Republican strategy calls for total obstruction of any major legislation that is not 100 percent Republican, a Democratic majority in the Senate can’t pass whatever emerges from a House-Senate conference even though Dems hold 59 out of a 100 seats. (And Rep. Boehner, it’s “the Democratic majority,” not “Democrat.” But you knew that already.)
But there’s another part to the clip that set me off. It comes in the last few seconds when a reporter outside the frame asks Boehner, “Do you think [Obama’s] sincerely listening to your concerns?” “We’ll see,” Boehner solemnly intones.
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about our discourse today is the pretense among the media and the commentariat that these Republicans are open to discussion — that there actually is a meeting point in the middle, or even right of the middle, where the Republicans finally say, “OK, it’s a deal.” There isn’t. The Republican objective isn’t to shape policy with their own ideas — it’s to make sure policy doesn’t get made at all.
One suspects that many in the media know this. But for some reason, they have to engage in the kabuki theater of pretending that Republicans actually do want to participate in governing, when obstructionism in the pursuit of regaining power is clearly their game plan. Just once I’d like a journalist to ask of Republicans, “You have asked Democrats to drop some of their priorities to achieve compromise. Which of your priorities are you willing to drop?” Or, “If the president accepts your pet provisions for health reform, which of his provisions would you accept?” But in the current media narrative, all the onus to achieve bipartisanship is on Obama and the Democrats. Bipartisanship will be measured by how much they give in to a Republican Party that doesn’t have to budge at all.
